kathryn bigelow

I AM AN F-B-I AGENT!

she is my mom's favorite director

i remember liking Strange Days when it came out. I was 14.

Near Dark, of course, but Point Break has batshit-awesome action scenes.

oh wait shit i missed Point Break up there, dang

i always have to watch strange days when it's randomly on cable.

Strange Days has that awful disturbing rape sequence, right? Glah.

Near Dark is the pick btw.

yeah that's the one. also starring angela basset's arms.

Looking good in that pic.

Near Dark is on hulu! i will watch it tonight.

Strange Days, easy!

Strange Days has that awful disturbing rape sequence, right? Glah.

― Alex in SF, Tuesday, October 21, 2008 6:22 PM (3 hours ago) Bookmark

oh yeah i forgot about that :-/

Near Dark for me.

"We keep odd hours."

I remember how Strange Days was promoted as The Future as we were understanding how far the Information Highway would eventually stretch.

hurt locker is pretty good!!

can i get all name-droppy and say when i interviewed her she was super intelligent, articulate and gracious?? and awesome?

I remember catching a screening of STRANGE DAYS and feeling physically torn between groans and lulz pretty much all the way through. Yet it feels as though if I go back and watch it now it might actually be better than it was then. Is that possible, or did it just suck ass?

I remember how Strange Days was promoted as The Future as we were understanding how far the Information Highway would eventually stretch.

And now Ralph Fiennes is everywhere on huge TV screens.

^^ lol

Pretty much peaked with NEAR DARK then.

1. Point Break Indo (2009)
aka "Point Break 2" - USA (working title)
!

wow where are all the POINT BREAK fans???

POINT BREAK was and is awful.

point break is point great!

stfu rogermexico

lol get one functioning suck-o-meter

roger I believe you are now entering the DANGER ZONE

ya roger, get a dangerzone-o-meter. get ONE of them.

strange days does kind of suck and is sort of cringe-y about race sometimes in addition to the really hard-to-watch rape stuff, but then it is also kind of awesome? but i can't really defend that point of view. it's definitely ambitious.

its heart is in the right place!

^^^ should've been a pull quote on the poster

I still haven't seen the loveless

I think I'm one of 5 people who saw near dark in the theatres

i still have strange days on tape

angela bassett is very beautiful and compelling in it! i have seen it so many times.

I've never understood how she could have been married to James Cameron.

come on, two brainy '80s action directors at the top of their games, it seems like a natural fit

james cameron is a douche but he did make aliens

Good while it lasted, I guess.

if james cameron or ridley scott would just agree to make another aliens movie i would forgive them everything

ridley scott just signed on to make a film version of "the forever war"~

i know... he should make it aliens meets the forever war. as far as i'm concerned. that's what he should do.

i think kathryn bigelow's relative lack of work is a stain upon hollywood considering she's ten times better than some of these d-bags they put in the director's chair for big-budget action flicks.

anyway strange days is really good, i totally like it and anything that's wrong with it has more to do with some lame plot points and less to do with the directing. point break and near dark are great. i've heard k-19 is better than its non-existent rep might suggest. blue steel is solid. the trailers i've seen for the hurt locker look really good.

anything that's wrong with it has more to do with some lame plot points and less to do with the directing.

true!

k-19 is quite good, very thrilling and tragic. it's honest about trying to work in a very restrictive political culture w/o being all nutty red dawn about it or dimly allegorical like enemy at the gates was.

but everyone delivers in these goofy boris badenoff accents. whoever decided on that, way to ruin a movie.

I only saw the '87-91 trio, so ND. It's time to do a fullout gay remake of Point Break.

why duz poll expire before we see Hurt Locker?

I think I'm one of 5 people who saw near dark in the theatres

I'm one of the other four then.

wtf @ hurt locker trailers being in italian

Automatic thread bump. This poll is closing tomorrow.

Automatic thread bump. This poll's results are now in.

realize that I had been dreaming of a movie called "Perfect Dark Thirty" after the n64 game

oh god there was actually a sequel called perfect dark zero

perfect dark zero dark thirty

not nearly as riveting as The Hurt Locker; suffers from being "important." Don't sweat the torture, it's all worth it in the end.

and really, gays, Chastain is not that good an actor yet.

Don't sweat the torture, it's all worth it in the end.

stop quoting from John Kerry's confirmation hearings

My film class watched Strange Days tonight. I was always pretty forgiving of its stupidity, but how did I never notice how awful the acting (Angela Bassett being the exception) was until now?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HFeWsDpy9y0

nope

words on Detroit

https://www.criterion.com/current/posts/4753-the-daily-kathryn-bigelow-s-detroit

So nobody who has seen and has any thoughts on this film? Saw it this morning, it's deeply upsetting, and not solely for reasons they intended, I think. Points for calling it a rebellion, for clearly showing police brutality, not just in the central scenes, but throughout the story. But there are things that just simply doesn't make sense, and as in Zero Dark Thirty I get the feeling that the film thinks it's critical of the state, but ends up covering the really dirty stuff up.

I have no interest in this one but I feel the need to rewatch ZD30, I've never really bought the notion of it as CIA propaganda despite Boal and Bigelow's moves

One thing that's completely fucked up is having a 30-year old man playing Carl Cooper, the 17-year old teenager who fired the starting pistol that began the whole thing. After Tamir Rice, that's honestly just unacceptable.

My two most hated moments in Zero Dark Thirty is of course when it's indicated that a lead from torture leads to the next step in the investigation, but also when a state official reprimands a CIA agent because of what happened in Iraq. I mean, that's critical of the CIA but it's completely letting Bush and Cheney off the hook for knowingly picking and choosing their intelligence.

i've only seen zd30 once and iirc crucial info which helps bag bin laden comes from ahem 'enhanced interrogation', which didn't happen in real life, so assuming my recollection is correct i'm happy to remain on the 'fuck kathryn bigelow' train despite believing point break to be a masterpiece

We were going to see Detroit but i read a few things like this http://thegrapevine.theroot.com/i-walked-out-of-detroit-because-wtf-man-1797338083 and we decided not to and then didn't even go to the movies after all.

I kinda get the idea that white people should see and think over this film, since it's a telling example of racism and white privilige both in it's story and in it's production. The more I read about it, the more this whole thing becomes a symptom of something very, very wrong. The responses that this was not Kathryn Bigelow's story to tell is mostly so damning because it still hasn't been told by black people before. The book on the events was written by a white writer, and relied mostly on interviews with the white people present, including the perpetrators. It honestly got me thinking how fucked up it is that there isn't a whole (recognized) subgenre of black testimonials. Like with the Holocaust, people read diaries, biographies, it's acknowledged that it's important that we delve into the experience of the Jews. But who does this with black Americans? Why is there no standard collection of diary entries from, like, any of the riots? Why was the first (?) African-American film on slavery Nate Parkers Birth of a Nation? I mean, at some point these stories should become everyones to tell, that, for me, is the importance of something like Son of Saul. But there's a whole first level of testimony that has been suppressed.

Btw I might be majorly wrong about this, of course, and if so I would love some examples of this kind of thing. Will read more.

I mean, right, there's 12 Years A Slave. But this feels like discussion for another thread.

i feel like the answer to these questions might be 'racism'

just a hunch

Yeah, the answer is clearly racism, I know that. And Steve McQueen is British.

Detroit seemed to go on forever. I think it took half-an-hour before there was even an effort to sketch in any of the characters. About all I got out of the whole thing was the Dramatics connection.

k-19 is quite good, very thrilling and tragic. it's honest about trying to work in a very restrictive political culture w/o being all nutty red dawn about it or dimly allegorical like enemy at the gates was.

but everyone delivers in these goofy boris badenoff accents. whoever decided on that, way to ruin a movie.

― goole, Wednesday, 22 October 2008 17:35 (ten years ago)

Liam Neeson just reverts to an Irish accent by the end. Side effect of the radiation, probably.

find me one liam neeson movie where he doesn't just give up the accent before the end, i challenge anyone

cannae be done!

thats not an irish accent

is he serious is he not ooooOoOoh

ullans?

point break is fantastic. zero dark thirty is torture propaganda that is good for me to poop on

"The Loveless" would be halfway watchable if anyone other than DaFoe could act. Robert Gordon absolutely stinks. The extended, languid takes garnished with bad dialogue almost seem like a blueprint for Refn's "Too Old To Die Young".

I found A House of Dynamite gripping. The structure of it worked especially well.

I liked it, but was ambivalent about the structure. I enjoyed seeing all of the different perspectives and understand why a more straightforward narrative might've made it difficult to juggle all of them at once. But I feel like the stop-and-start saps the momentum, especially since the second and third segments don't really complicate what you've already seen in the first one. And the ending does not provide a reward for the patient viewer.

i saw "the movie written by the guy who tried to cover up the NBC sex scandals? no thanks" and that's where Im at

All the air goes out of the movie each time we circle back to the beginning.

Every time Bigelow cut to an Ike photo on the wall, I laughed louder.

There was the strange feeling shortly into this of "oh, this is a normal president." Makes sense that this would've been in pre-production a few years back, and it feels much more made for a Harris administration than the ones we've got.

But I dug it. Then again, I dug Don't Look Up, and both seem similar as far as finding a dramatic way to put us through something out there that could end the world.

It's if Bigelow made the film for a future J. Hoberman book.

*as if

I enjoyed the loops back, and didn’t feel it missed anything by not complicating things — nor that it was trying to, as the premise of the entire film is about people trying to make decisions about individual, incomplete perspectives on extremely limited information. That we “learn” some things again, learn more things through some characters, and see different perspectives through others is meant to broaden our understanding of the individual confusions, not confer a readerly omniscience of which the participants are deprived.

One woman in my screening did scream “WHATT??!¡” at the ending, to punctured-balloon laughter from other punters.

This isn't spoiling anything important, but I imagine the budget involved in staging a gigantic Civil War reenactment for reasons tangential to the plot (versus having the same character at Target or something).

Timeloop structure bad, politics also bad but that was to be expected. Some fun scenes of good actors being TENSE.

The tense Deputy National Security Adviser managed to get on my nerves in a major way.

The movie is a direct lift of Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario. Regardless of what you might think of her earlier books (speculative nonsense or illconsidered propaganda from a Joe Rogan repeat guest) it’s worth checking out, especially if you have any remote interest in this.

I didn’t mind the loops in the movie, and sometimes I found the callbacks legit clever (especially when you learn what happens on that SECDEF call). I think a case can be made that as you go up levels of power and decision making, the actual decision-makers are worse and more ill-prepared for their jobs. This doesn’t allow for a satisfying movie where the president is the main character of act 3, but maybe that’s the point?

Legit worried that folks’ takeaway from this isn’t “nuclear war is bad, we should avoid it” but “hfs we need to spend a trillion dollars on better interceptors like now!"

I couldn't really blame anyone for that takeaway - the decision to make the attack come from an anonymous, unknowable source was presumably made to avoid the film becoming propaganda, but it has the opposite effect. Without a power taking responsibility, there can be no diplomatic alternatives, no way to reason - yes retaliating w/o knowing you're hitting the correct perpetrator is madness, but then it's a mad world, the US has unseen enemies and they are not interested in negotiating.

Meanwhile in the real world afaik sti only one country in the world has used nukes as a weapon of war.

The movie is a direct lift of Annie Jacobsen’s Nuclear War: A Scenario.

i have read the book but have not seem the bigelow movie. villeneuve has the option for the book iiuc, and I assume everyone involved has lawyers, so maybe not a *direct* lift?

https://deadline.com/2024/04/nuclear-war-movie-denis-villeneuve-legendary-dune-part-two-bestselling-book-1235876114/

given the production timeline the bigelow thing might also be based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_2020_Commission_Report_on_the_North_Korean_Nuclear_Attacks_Against_the_United_States?

At least one of those situation rooms depicted in the movie is under the now-razed East Wing.

the decision to make the attack come from an anonymous, unknowable source was presumably made to avoid the film becoming propaganda, but it has the opposite effect. Without a power taking responsibility, there can be no diplomatic alternatives, no way to reason

idk, i took it more that if we knew who the aggressor was, the movie would just be about how we dealt with that particular situation. maybe my biases are showing but i felt like the movie was more interested in conveying the idea that nuclear weapons are an unsolvably dangerous problem, not because america has Big Bad Evil Enemies who can't be reasoned with, but because our shit doesnt work and everyone involved is a fallible human, from the button-pushers in Alaska to the president. and when the chips are down they will start barfing, bickering with each other, committing suicide, or all three.

like the country who launched couldn't have known that we would be unaware of who launched - it wasnt an evil devious plan, its just the inherent incompetence which is baked into human-run systems, but which few decision makers are humble enough to account for. idk if i really get much of a politics out of it beyond "there is no safe way for nuclear weapons to exist." like the statistics about how owning a gun "for protection" makes it exponentially more likely that you will due by gunshot - the very existence of systems designed to protect us will ensure our destruction. i loathed the politics of Bigelows war on terror films and again maybe i'm seeing what i want to see, but i enjoyed how this takes such a dim view of the national security state.

obv "nuclear weapons are bad" isnt a groundbreaking take, but when i was expecting some 24-ass "there are bad people in the world who will stop at nothing to get us" type shit, it was nice to instead get "everyone tasked with keeping us alive is going to be fucking around yakking about baseball games and potato chip crumbs until it too late"

And focusing almost entirely on 18 minutes really drives home the reality that if/when this happens, it’ll likely be over before we know it’s begun.

Well I mean does anyone really expect the national security state to be able to stop an already launched nuclear weapon? The horror is preordained from the get go, the only real dilemma is whether to launch some nukes yourself to add to the carnage, and I feel like the film gives a hawkish viewer enough of an argument to go "yes, they should". But either way, Chicago's toast, and nothing anyone in govt did has any influence at all on that - the reasons are unknowable, because the enemy is unknown.

given the production timeline the bigelow thing might also be based on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_2020_Commission_Report_on_the_North_Korean_Nuclear_Attacks_Against_the_United_States?

It's a different scenario (that book also has Trump as president and acting accordingly), but the author is a good bsky follow if you're into this: @armscontrolwonk.bsky.social

Timely viewing in the wake of this news.